Rejoinder

20 Historically Speaking November/December 2006 Rejoinder Marc Trachtenberg How should historians and political scientists —and above all diplomatic historians and international relations theorists—relate to each other? Some of the commentators, especially Fraser Harbutt and Robert Jervis, believe that people in both fields have a lot to gain by taking each others' work seriously. And Jervis, I think, puts his finger on perhaps the most basic reason why a productive relationship is possible when he says ar the verv end of his comment that many of us have a bit of both disciplines in us. Donald Kagan is a bit. more reserved. He doesn't reject the idea that theory is important , but he's obviously not overenamored with contemporary international relations theory. Thucydides , he feels, offered a profound theory of what makes tor war, and contemporary theorists have scarcely come up with anything better. Eliot Cohen also admires Thucvdides and thinks there is a lot to be learned, more generally, from an "older school of international relations theorists"—that is, from people like Raymond Aron, Arnold Wolters, and Martin Wight. But he doesn't think that we historians have much to learn from most of the international relations theorists we see around us today. Many—perhaps most—historians would, I think, share Cohen's assessment. They don't have a particularly high regard for what they find in the political science literature or for international relations theory in particular. And they take it for granted that historians can get by quite well on their own—by using their common sense or by interacting with other historians—and doubt whether they have much to gain by paying attention to the political scientists and by interacting with them intellectually. I understand that view, and I certainly wouldn't dismiss Cohen's assessment out of hand. I also tind much of the literature one finds in the journals Cohen mentions "dessicated, dogmatic, and narrow" and devoid of interest. But for me that is all beside the point. Do you judge a field mainly by what you find as you trudge drearily through the journals? 1 don't think so. I'd hate to have the historical profession as a whole dismissed as worthless because of the kind of thing you find in the American Historical Review. A handful of works, in fact, can make all the difference in terms of how you feel about a particular discipline and what it gives you intellectually. So if I take a relatively positive view of the value of international relations theory, it's because of the high regard I have for a handful of scholars in that field. And I have a high regard for them because of the impact their works have had on me personally. So let me talk a bit about my own personal experience —that is, how 1 came to reach the conclusions I did. I was never committed to using theory as an end in itself. I just did my work in the usual way, Crowds of people meeting M. Maisky, Soviet ambassador, at a tank factory somewhere in Great Britain, 1942 or 1943. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USW34- 000620-ZB]. and those conclusions about the value of theory took shape without any particular effort on my part. 1 was working on the Cold War, and I knew nuclear issues played an important role in that conflict. I wanted to understand those issues, so I started to read the main works on the subject—especially the works by Schelling and Brodie to which Cohen alludes . And I was verv impressed by what I found there. It was not that I agreed with everything those writers said. But in grappling with their arguments, I think 1 developed a deeper understanding of how international politics works in the nuclear age. I couid see that the problems people faced did not have simple or obvious solutions; I could see what the issues were, why diey were important, and how they related to each other. And that for me was of enormous value when 1 did my historical work. But it wasn't just that. By the...